Personal

Apple Magic Mouse review

My Magic mouse arrived today by Fedex. I bought it on the Apple Store the day it was announced. Installation was very easy. Click on the bluetooth menu and setup blue tooth device. It found the mouse and then connected to it. I'm using an iMac running the latest Snow Leopard. The mouse worked straight away. Left and right click and mouse movement were all fine.

I did a software update then and it downloaded a 67MB update for the mouse for the system preferences panel. The panel is nice with video of the various things you can do with it. I enabled the secondary click so right clicks kept working and now all the touch scroll features worked. The update did require a full restart however.

Mouse clicks do have physical feedback. The upper surface of the mouse is attached so the front is raised and depresses when you click giving nice feedback.

The scrolling works very well on the mouse so I think it was worth getting. It's super convenient and very natural. Much better than dragging scroll bars etc. Once you get used to it a scroll bar seems pretty clunky. Momentum scrolling is very cool. Flick your finger and the window scrolls to the top or bottom quickly. Very nice.

The mouse feels heavy which I like, it feels very solid under your hand. Must be the batteries.

Apple could improve the packaging a little which is surprising given their packaging is usually top class. The mouse is attached to the box with an adhesive strip and the adhesive is, well, a little too adhesive. It left a residue on the underside of the mouse which you can't see but is a little annoying.

I'll post more on battery life later but it arrived at 100%. Overall, it's the best mouse I've ever used. A must have upgrade.

Enabling jconsole and jmap etc on Java 6 with Snow Leopard

I just got this working. Out of the box, the jmap utility won't connect to a Java 6 JVM. It complains about being unable to open the socket to the target JVM. Enabling the JVM JMX connector doesn't help and adding -server doesn't help either.

It looks like you need the following on the JVM command lines:

JMXTOOLS="-server -Xverify:none -Xshare:off -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote"

After adding the above then the jmap command and so on will work with the JVM. Just run ps to find the pid and the run jmap -histo:live pid to see the results.

Added a second 2Tb drive to the Drobo

I have a 1Tb, 750Gb, 1Tb and 2Tb drives in the Drobo now. All is green but the last 2Tb drive didn't give me more capacity because of the way Drobo works. I'm adding another 2Tb drive just now to actually increase available capacity.

I pulled another of the 1Tb drives and slotted in the 2Tb. I got another WD Caviar green drive. They are 199 bucks at Best Buy. I managed to get 30 bucks back for the one I bought on Thursday also so good deal. The Drobo is currently doing the usual relayout after swapping drives so I guess 36 hours to go before it's all green again.

Expanding my Drobo with a 2Tb drive today

Today I decided to start upgrading my Drobo in capacity. I'm using 1.5Tb of 2.5Tb total. My Drobo is a 2nd gen running 1.3.5. firmware on FW800 with MacOS Snow leopard. I have the following drives right now: 1Tb, 750Gb, 1Tb, 1Tb. I pulled a 1Tb drive and inserted the 2Tb drive. Why not the 750Gb? because the 2Tb makes no difference to capacity until I add two of them. So, I may as well take the 1Tb and use it and then replace the 750Gb next month to complete this upgrade.

It's currently rebuilding the array, 14 hours to go and it usually is longer. I figure by tomorrow morning, it'll be done. I don't get any more space until I repeat this again with another 2Tb drive next month. This is just the way Drobo's partitioning mechanism works.

I bought a Black Window naked drive enclosure also for 60 bucks and plan to use that with the 1Tb drive I removed to backup critical files from the Drobo and elsewhere. Plus, it's handy to have when upgrading drives on the Macs.

UPDATE: The relayout just finished after about 36 hours... All green again. Time to add the next 2Tb drive now.